Vertov wanted to tell a story about the beauty of communist society, and the importance and nobility of the struggle and sacrifice to build it. He was more radical than many others at the time, both in politics and art. Following Trotsky, he demanded a full nationalization and socialization of the economy. His first documentary Cinema-Eye (Kino-Glaz, 1924) announced itself to viewers as “The first exploration of/Life caught unawares/The first non-artificial cinema object/without/scenario/without/actors or studio.” In an intensely edited and hard-to-follow whirligig of images, it decried the continuing evidence of capitalism and corruption in the economy. He made three more films in quick succession, each pushing forward experiments in editing that used juxtaposition to make connections with actuality film.
Vertov’s work, so deliberately unconventional and challenging, intrigued and baffled critics, irritated friends, and incited fierce debate among filmmakers. He made many enemies, and he lost his Moscow job. His masterwork, Man with a Movie Camera, brought arguments to a head. With his wife and his cinematographer brother Michael, he created one of the most astonishing and provocative pieces of film art of all time. It was intended to be a sweeping panorama of a transformed nation, where unconsciously the daily lives of ordinary people had become part of a magnificent modernist poem. If Walt Whitman had heard America singing, Dziga Vertov heard the Soviet singing.
A city symphony, Man with a Movie Camera used a day-in-the-life format, bracketed by a theatrical conceit. The viewer entered with cinemagoers, and the film ended as they departed. In between, the pixieish cinematographer used the camera’s magic to take the viewer into intimate settings (a baby being born, a couple getting divorced), across great landscapes, into workplaces and gymnasia. The cinematographer and the editor played visual jokes—special effects produced for the delight of display of the wonders of this new technology, which could reveal by representing.
In the end, the film commented as much on the power and pleasure of the filmmaker as it did on the extraordinary achievements of the new Russian society. It was the practice that went along with Vertov’s fiercely argued theory for the transcendent power of documentary film, not only to record society but to see and imagine it differently than deemed possible by mere human beings. Its opening credits boasted its ambition: “This experimental work is directed towards the creation of a genuine, international purely cinematic language, entirely distinct from the language of the theatre and literature.”
The work dazzled and delighted artists and critics worldwide, in part because its ambiguities so pleasurably piqued their curiosity and, of course, also reinforced the self-regard of artists. Russian audiences, who increasingly selected among entertaining comedies and dramas from regional film industries as well as international popular films, felt just the opposite; they complained they didn’t know what it was about. The film ruined Vertov’s already-imperiled future within an increasingly rigid Soviet Union, where both artistic and political experimentation were suppressed. After a formally exhilarating experiment in sound, Enthusiasm or Symphony of the Don Basin (1931), Vertov found it hard to get work in the government-controlled industry. His rigorous and relentless experimentalism had fallen out of favor, replaced by easy-to-digest platitudes. In his later years he was put to work editing tedious newsreels and documentaries in praise of Stalin.
While Vertov’s work generated enormous energy among artistic and political circles in the Soviet Union, it was not widely seen there. Kino-Glaz (1924) was only shown once in public. Forward, Soviet! (1926) showed briefly in three theaters, without publicity. One Sixth of the World (1926) was not shown on first-run screens. The Eleventh Year (1928) played to thousands of Ukrainian viewers, and Man with a Movie Camera was shown nationally but not appreciated by general audiences. Film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein, who was an early admirer of Vertov, found himself increasingly exasperated by what he called Vertov’s “unmotivated camera mischief.” (Vertov vigorously argued back that Eisenstein needed to respect the power of actuality instead of faking reality in storytelling.)
5. Russian revolutionary artist Dziga Vertov experimented with shocking formal techniques in Man with a Movie Camera. Directed by Dziga Vertov, 1929.
Vertov’s reputation, smothered in the Soviet Union, was kept alive partly by the enthusiasm of Western artists. He was also an important figure to anti-communist writers such as Herbert Marshall, who chronicled his career as one of several “crippled creative biographies” of the USSR. His reputation was also revived by scholars, crucially including film historian Jay Leyda, who witnessed the early years of Russian cinema, and film scholar Annette Michelson, who published and analyzed Vertov’s work in English.
Vertov’s challenges and his experiments have remained provocative for generations of avant-garde filmmakers: he imagined a film form that transcended the strictures of narrative and naturalist storytelling. The kind of realism that Robert Flaherty chose, implicitly or explicitly telling a struggle-to-survive story, was anathema to Vertov and to filmmakers who wanted to use art to shatter expectations of the status quo. His work and Eisenstein’s were important to John Grierson, who was attracted to their claims that film could serve social change. Filmmakers in the 1960s who broke free of what had become staged conventions in documentary film adopted Vertov as a cultural hero. Martin Scorsese, having picked up Man with a Movie Camera at random in a video store, professed himself thrilled by the possibilities it opened up. Vertov’s semicoherent, ambiguous but deliriously confident experiments continue to astonish spectators and inspire filmmakers.
These three founding figures established three disparate sets of expectations among both filmmakers and viewers for documentary: ennobling entertainment (Flaherty), socially useful storytelling (Grierson), and provocative experiment (Vertov). Their names became synonymous with these approaches, and these three devolved into iconic figures for later documentarians.
Cinema Verité
Practices set in motion by the legendary trio of documentary founders were profoundly shaken up in the 1960s revolution that was variously called cinema verité, observational cinema, and direct cinema. This style broke dramatically with then-standard documentary practices of advance planning, scripting, staging, lighting, reenactment, and interviewing. All these traditional approaches had accommodated the limitations of large, heavy 35mm equipment, and they were appropriate to audience expectations of the time. Cinema verité (to use a popular umbrella term) employed the far lighter 16mm technology made more popular and accessible after the military deployed it during the war. Cinema verité spoke in a fresh voice, often about different subjects. Cinema verité filmmakers took lighter, 16mm equipment into places that had not been seen before—the interiors of ordinary people’s homes, on the dance floor with teenagers, back rooms in political campaigns, backstage with celebrities, on line with strikers, inside mental hospitals—and filmed what they saw. They took huge quantities of filmed footage into editing rooms, and through editing they found a story to tell. They used the innovation of sync (for “synchronized”) sound—for the first time they could record image and sound simultaneously in 16mm—to overhear ordinary conversation, and they mostly did away with narration.
Practitioners now span the field, including filmmakers whose work antedates the movement, such as legendary French filmmaker Agnès Varda (The Gleaners and I [Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse], 2000), filmmakers whose work shapes current practice such as Britain’s Kim Longinotto, and China’s Wang Bing (West of Tracks [Tie Xi Qu], 2003), and emerging filmmakers. One demonstration of how commonly this style is picked up by aspiring filmmakers is the Steps for the Future project (2002). This international co-production between South African national television (SABC) and several European public service televisions tackled the controversial topic of AIDS in southern Africa. Some thirty-eight films resulted, most from first-time filmmakers; most were made using cinema verité conventions.
Evolution
This revolution in style began at a time of
rising distrust among consumers of top-down media authority, perhaps seasoned by the public’s experience of World War II propaganda and certainly by the rise of advertising as an international language of persuasion and the power of mass media. That distrust of media was itself imbedded in a much wider trend of social movements for justice, equality, political openness, and inclusion. These movements touched every corner of the world and resulted in the end of colonialism, changes in governments, and civil rights victories for discriminated-against social groups ranging from low-status castes to women to disabled people.
The first inklings of this movement in fact had nothing to do with technology. Films that emerged from Britain’s Free Cinema movement in the late 1950s are distinguished by flouting the sober Griersonian mandate to educate and inform in the service of civic unity. Free Cinema literally freed itself from precisely that mandate. Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland (1953) and Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson’s Momma Don’t Allow (1956) took viewers on a vacation with working-class kids going to an amusement part and a jazz club. The films did not implicitly judge their characters or dictate to viewers what to conclude from what they saw, nor did they tell viewers that what they were seeing was important. The films were chances to peer into zestful moments of ordinary life and frank statements about the personal interests of the filmmaker. Other work took a strong rebellious moral stance, opposed to the status quo. For example, French filmmaker Georges Franju made Blood of the Beasts (Le sang des bêtes, 1949) and Hôtel des Invalides (1952), profiling a slaughterhouse and a veterans’ home, respectively. Blood of the Beasts exposed the cruelty behind the routine provisioning of meat and drew implicit comparisons between the slaughter of animals and that of people; the second was openly antimilitary and anticlerical.
Filmmakers in Canada, the United States, and France quickly pushed technological innovation to promote a new way of doing documentary. Time-Life Broadcasting bankrolled experiments by Robert Drew, who worked with engineer D A Pennebaker, and filmmakers David and Albert Maysles and Richard Leacock. (Leacock had become hooked on documentary by working with Flaherty on Louisiana Story.) With the help of French documentarian and engineer Jean-Pierre Beauviola, these innovative filmmakers succeeded in developing a system that recorded simultaneous sound without requiring all the equipment to be linked together and to the subject.
In the United States, experiments bloomed, not always successfully. The Drew team followed an electoral battle between John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in Primary (1960). Baffled ABC programmers refused to air it, saying it looked like “rushes” (the unedited day’s footage); today, the film looks carefully crafted, although it communicates a breathless immediacy, as Jeanne Hall has stated. The ABC television network continued to dabble in the form, although it freely recut the material to fit the network’s purposes. For instance, when Richard Leacock produced Happy Mother’s Day (1963), a film about the birth of quintuplets that revealed crass commercialism in the public celebration of the births, ABC recut the footage to turn it into a heartwarming story of a town uniting to help the family. (Leacock later released the original.)
Cinema verité (sometimes called direct cinema, observational cinema, or in Canada, candid eye, after a TV series) electrified filmmakers with its possibilities. David and Al Maysles produced a series of striking feature documentaries that were celebrated in the arts-repertory circuit that was then a vital artery of film culture. In Salesman (1969), the brothers followed a group of Bible salesmen, who were living the contradictions of the American dream, as they relentlessly hawked a sacred book. Film editor Charlotte Zwerin turned their footage into an American tragedy. It was a sad and evocative statement about the collapse of a dream, which was released at the height of social divisions in the country around the Vietnam war and cultural values. Although Salesman had sharp social overtones, most of the Maysles’s work avoided political subjects.
At the Canadian NFB, cinema verité—which began as a slap in the face of social moralism—became a central style, ironically for a unit started by John Grierson. One of the pioneer films was a portrait of teen idol Paul Anka, Lonely Boy (1961), which kicked off an entire category of backstage celebrity films. The NFB’s Challenge for Change program—launched in 1966 by Colin Low and John Kemeny to encourage new voices and issues to surface in Canadian documentary, partly by training amateurs to use the camera—adopted cinema verité as its natural language. Grierson, always eager to show his influence, immediately claimed that Challenge for Change was only following in his tradition of documenting social problems.
6. Salesman, a classic of cinema vérité filmmaking, turned the hawking of Bibles into a parable about the American dream. Directed by Albert Maysles and David Maysles, 1968.
Filmmakers worldwide seized upon the fly-on-the-wall opportunities provided by this approach. For instance, Nagisa Oshima produced for Japanese TV The Forgotten Imperial Army (1963), about Korean veterans of the Japanese army caught between Korea and Japan and without veterans’ services. The renowned filmmaker Kon Ichikawa produced Tokyo Olympiad (1965), an ironic bow to German Leni Riefenstahl’s exquisitely executed work for the Nazi government. Ichikawa closely observed athletes and made them not into emblems of the nation as Riefenstahl had, but into individuals struggling for their personal best. In India, the “parallel cinema” produced verité-style documentaries including S. Sukhdev’s India 67 (1967).
Inside institutions
Fred Wiseman, a Boston-born lawyer-turned-filmmaker whose work was primarily done on public TV, produced work with a consistent, very different tone. His film career exposing the lived experience of institutions began with Titicut Follies (1967), which took viewers inside a Massachusetts mental hospital. A high school, hospital, boot camp, zoo, ballet company, court, housing project, and state legislature are among the many subjects of his films. They typically chronicle relationships that feature victims of impersonal, regimented social systems and the enforcers of those systems. The viewer never sees the filmmaker; there is no narration; the viewer simply enters the world of the institutionalized. And yet Wiseman, through sharply pointed editing and choices for subject matter, sits harshly in judgment on a system and society that treat human beings like problems to be managed. In Titicut Follies, it may have been this stern implicit indictment that led the Massachusetts state authorities to ban the film, even after it won awards; they argued that Wiseman had not gotten permission from enough people in the film to legally represent them on screen. The film may also have influenced the closing of the institution featured in the film. Wiseman’s work has since been shown regularly on American public TV, where it has been an important demonstration of public TV’s claim to innovation and significance.
To see how differently a participant-observation approach on institutions may be used, one might contrast Titicut Follies’s damning portrait with other films focusing on mental institutions. One of the best-known works of the Canadian documentarian Allan King, Warrendale (1967), let viewers spend time in a school for troubled young people. King’s early hero had been Flaherty; King opposed the “propaganda” model of Grierson, which was so popular in Commonwealth countries. Grierson, he believed, had put the form into a “political straitjacket.” Warrendale’s approach reflects his humanist outlook. Where Titicut is a place of horror, Warrendale—an experiment King admired—appears both prison and refuge, where suffering people undertake their own tentative recoveries with assistance. King portrayed Warrendale as an imperfect organism composed of flawed but mostly decent people.
Finally, one might look at Thin (2006), which shows an American clinic dealing with eating disorders. Directed by photographer Lauren Greenfield and produced by R. J. Cutler, a protégé of D A Pennebaker, the film takes viewers inside the clinic for a season, sharing with viewers the perspectives of both patients and staff. Rather than the judgment of Wiseman or the empathy of King, it brings voyeuristic fascination to its subject.
Provocation
Some filmm
akers used the new techniques to provoke as well as to observe, as Erik Barnouw noted. In France, Jean Rouch, an anthropologist-filmmaker who wanted to let subjects tell their own stories, used new 16mm technology (in the process his team refined sync sound innovations) to probe the consciousness of postwar, postcolonial Paris. His group borrowed the term “cinema verité” from Dziga Vertov’s kino-pravda, and they made Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un Été, 1961).
The film records the interactions of a small group of young people, selected from co-director Edgar Morin’s friends in a small, politically radical group. The friends conduct interviews with strangers on the street and film their own conversations. A Holocaust survivor’s story shocks African students, who in turn expose the daily racism of the metropole toward the colonials; a neurotic Italian woman searches in vain for ordinary happiness. Within the film, characters comment on earlier parts of the film, and the filmmakers debate the different approaches.
The small experiment reverberated among activist-makers. The French radical director Chris Marker used its techniques to challenge the French with questions such as “Do you feel we live in a democracy?” in The Lovely May (1963); Jan Apta, a Czech filmmaker, conducted an on-camera survey of young people about their dreams and hopes in Nejvetsi Prani (The Greatest Wish [1964]); in Opinião Publica (Public Opinion [1967]), Brazilian filmmaker Arnaldo Jabor recorded the perspectives of lower-middle-class residents of Rio de Janeiro—a voice not heard before in Brazilian film and television.
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